Andalusia

Andalusia is the historic home where American author Flannery O'Connor lived from 1951 until her death from lupus in 1964. This is where she was living when she completed her two novels and two collections of short stories. Andalusia is open to the public Thursday through Sunday from 10am to 5pm. For more information, call 478-454-4029.
Blog contributors include Executive Director, Elizabeth Wylie, and a variety of scholars and authors. The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the authors and do not
necessarily reflect the opinions of Andalusia Farm.

Sunday, December 20, 2015

During my first visit to Andalusia last summer, one of the biggest
surprises to me was the containers of dirt for sale in the gift shop.
T-shirts, postcards, books—these I expected. Even the peacock feathers
made sense. But dirt? I’m told that when they didn’t sell it, fans would
dig it up themselves. Or try to steal signs, fauna, scraps of wood—any
sort of material souvenir of O’Connor’s home has been fair game. What do
we make of such weird fandom? Flannery O’Connor attracts serious
scholars. The annual Flannery O’Connor and Other Southern Women Writers
Conference reflects the scholarship that her work continues to elicit. A
quick library database search returns nearly fifty peer-reviewed
articles which have been published about her work in the past three
years, and I can only imagine that in the next few years, the attention
garnered by the newly available archives at Emory University will only
cause this output to increase.

However, she also attracts serious
fans—some scholars, but many not. It’s well known that artists
including U2, Bruce Springsteen, and REM have cited her as an influence
(and I have written elsewhere about her surprising influence on punk
music). There are novels such as Ann Napolitano’s 2011 novel A Good Hard
Look, which imagines O’Connor’s life in Milledgeville and her effect on
her neighbors there, as well as Carlene Bauer’s 2013 novel Frances and
Bernard, a fictional “what-might-have-been” account of her intense
friendship with poet Robert Lowell. And then there’s the annual birthday
parade at O’Connor’s childhood home in Savannah, Georgia. Every year,
to commemorate her birthday in March, people assemble at Lafayette
Square in Savannah in costume to parade, play music, and generally make a
joyful noise in appreciation of O’Connor’s life and work.

There are
people in minister’s hats and gorilla suits, in tribute to characters in
Wise Blood; there are costumes with peacock themes; and there are
plenty of people dressed as O’Connor herself, imitating her hairstyle,
glasses, and the 1950s dresses so many of us know from her photographs.
I
can only imagine how ridiculous O’Connor herself would have found such
shenanigans. Even when she was alive, she had a wry attitude toward what
she referred to as the “lunatic fringe” of her fandom. Complaining
about a letter she had received asking for an autographed photo,
O’Connor observed that “I feel that since I have now reached the lunatic
fringe there is no place left for me to go.” 1

Although authors do come from
everywhere, it’s tempting to think that artists emerging from
Milledgeville are unlikely, I suppose. Visit a city, and every third
barista has written a novel. Visit Milledgeville, and you see a cute
college town: less hipster than Athens; less self-conscious, perhaps,
than Oxford, Mississippi. There’s nothing unusual about Milledgeville
water, and unlike (so many) other Southern writers, O’Connor is not
known for her drinking—so, the argument that it’s something in the water
of central Georgia that produced O’Connor is a hard sell. What Georgia
does have is its dirt—even the Georgia Writers’ Association has an
annual Red Clay Writers’ Conference. And
although it has become
clichéd to speak of the centrality of place in Southern writing, I
believe that O’Connor paid enough attention to it in her work—whether
essays such as “The Regional Writer and His Country” or The Grotesque in
Southern Fiction” or stories such as “The Displaced Person” or “A
Circle in the Fire”—that it’s safe to say that the land occupied a
certain amount of her writerly attention.

But enough to merit its
commoditization? Perhaps. Fans of living authors will camp out for
hours for a few minutes in the presence of their hero. To have your name
articulated in speech and in an autograph implies an added layer of
intimacy to that you already feel you have, from living with the novel
or poem or song your hero has created. It feels like you’ve forged an
even stronger connection with the novel or poem or song that you love.
What, then, about the artists we can’t wait in line to see? That’s a big
reason, I believe, that such superfandom occurs.

When we (and
yes, I’ll admit “we” here, as I have been known to emulate O’Connor’s
sense of style) dress up like O’Connor and her characters—or want dirt
from Andalusia—I think that we’re trying to similarly forge more
intimate connections to things we have strong emotional reactions to.
It’s more complicated than “the things that we love”—no one just “loves”
O’Connor’s work. We’re struck by it, challenged by it, and feel
confused by it. So we keep returning to it.

We literary tourists
want to inhabit the outer versions of the worlds we have built in our
heads. We want to connect physically with the imaginations with which
we’ve already connected. O’Connor herself understood the desire for
souvenirs—she often sent her friends and admirers peacock feathers,
whose symbolism represented her own values.2 I hope, then, that she
would forgive our desire for dirt.

1. Apparently, parades of
people in sweater sets and pearls or gorilla costumes were beyond even
her own active imagination.

2. If you haven’t read her essay “King of Birds” about her fascination
with peacocks, go do so now. In fact, even if you have read it, go read
it again. And then listen to REM’s song with the same title.

Monica Miller is the
Assistant Director of the Writing and Communication Program and a Marion
L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgia Tech. Her current work
focuses on the figure of the ugly woman in southern literature.